Fatal Reaction

morning.”
    “What time?”
    “I left Danny’s between ten and ten-thirty.”
    “You went to see him at his apartment?”
    “I spent the night,” he replied. I could tell the words cost him. With every grudging admission I’m sure he felt like he was committing career suicide. He may very well have been. Frankly, Galloway’s career was the least of my concerns.
    “And how did he seem when you left him?”
    “Seem?” demanded Galloway, his temper flaring. “He seemed fine. What the hell are you trying to get at? You just told me Danny died of an ulcer. If you want to accuse me of something, why don’t you just come out with it? You expect me to sit here and set fire to my career, but you won’t even do me the courtesy of telling me why?”
    “Assuming you cared about Danny, I’d think you’d want to help.”
    “Help whom?” countered Galloway bitterly. “No one can help Danny, not anymore.”
    “Listen Tom,” I said, with more kindness in my voice than I actually felt. “If you want, anything you tell me will be protected by attorney-client privilege. I just need you to answer a couple of questions.”
    Tom fished his wallet out of his back pocket, extracted a single dollar bill, and handed it to me. “I want a receipt,” he said.
    I grabbed a scratch pad from beside the phone and scribbled one. As every first-year law student knows, there are two parts necessary for a binding contract—the oral or written agreement and some form of material consideration that changes hands from one party to the other. I had never been a dollar lawyer before.
    “When did you two start seeing each other?” I asked. “Was it when I gave you the Serezine litigation?”
    “Yes. I knew the minute I met him in your office. We both knew.”
    “What about your wife?” I asked.
    “I don’t expect you to understand.”
    “I’m your lawyer. Try me.”
    “Most people think that being gay means hopping into bed with someone of the same sex. But you know what it also means? It means you’re a member of the last minority that it’s okay to hate. It means the things that most people work so hard for—the kids, the station wagon, some kind of social standing in the community— all those things are closed off to you.”
    “Does your wife know you’re gay?”
    “No.”
    “So tell me this. I was there that day in my office and frankly, the only thing I remember going on was a discussion of Azor’s exposure on Serezine. How did Danny know you weren’t the happily married young lawyer the world thinks you are?”
    “Gaydar. It’s the sixth sense gay people have. When you’re gay, you can always tell when someone else is.”
    I tried to listen with an open mind, but images of Tom Galloway’s wife and children kept intruding themselves. The idea that he’d been cheating on his wife—with someone who was infected with AIDS no less—did more than offend me. It also made me wonder what Danny must have seen in him. Surely someone who was capable of such betrayal would be capable of anything—including keeping his hemorrhaging lover from using the telephone if he thought it would hurt his chances of partnership.
    “So you’ve been seeing each other pretty regularly since then?” I asked.
    “Whenever I could get away.”
    “And you had no idea he was dead until you called his office on Monday?”
    “No idea. How do you think this makes me feel?” he cried. “When I left him he was fine and the next day I find out he’s dead. You of all people should understand.”
    “What did you do when you heard he’d died?”/
    “I had to leave the office.”
    “Did you go to Danny’s apartment?”
    “No. Why would I go there?”
    “Did you have a key?”
    “No. Danny had once dated a' real psycho. Since then he’s never given anyone the key to his place.”
    “After you found out, did you call anybody to tell them the news? Any of his friends?”
    “I didn’t know any of Danny’s friends.”
    “So where did you go? Home?”
    “I went to the Ritz-Carlton and got myself a room. I needed to be alone.”
    “So is that where you were when your secretary told me there’d been a death in the family?”
    “Yes.”
    “What did you tell your family?”
    “I said I had to go to Philadelphia for a deposition,” he said, his face darkening.
    More so than when we talked about the details of his affair with Danny, whenever we talked about Galloway’s family I knew I was treading on dangerous